Infants and seriously ill patients who must be fed with liquids have recourse to nursing apparatus common to infant feeding. In this specification the term infant, unless otherwise specified, will be used uniformly to refer to all manner of organisms to which my invention might be applied including but not limited to human infants, adults or aged who are paralyzed, injured or disabled from any or no cause or who are physically restrained, and non human animals. The term milk will be used throughout this specification, unless otherwise specified, to apply to any sort of liquid which may be required or desired to be delivered to an infant, including but not restricted to liquids such as milk, juice of fruits or vegetables, solutions or suspensions of nutrients or pharmaceuticals in aqueous or other media, water or any other material than can be delivered by force of gravity or externally applied pressure including atmospheric air pressure, to an infant.
Nursing apparatus, which is well known to parents and to others responsible for the feeding of infants, generally consists of a container for holding the milk and a cap for the container which includes a soft rubber protruding portion or nipple, fabricated with a hole in the end of the protruding portion, as an integral or separate part of the cap. The milk is fed from the container, through the nipple, into the mouth of the sucking infant.
Typically, a parent will hold the feeding infant and the container, actively positioning and repositioning the container and its attached nipple to keep the nipple inserted into the infant's mouth. Since the filled container is relatively heavy and difficult to support without the nipple slipping out of the infant's mouth, stratagems have been developed to allow the infant to be fed without holding either the infant or the container. One stratagem involves strapping the container to a sandbag structure heavy enough to keep the container in a relatively fixed position with respect to the crib in which the infant lays. Should the infant change position, the container with its rigidly attached nipple cannot follow and the nipple slips out of the infant's mouth, an event soon followed by its anguished screams of rage at its having lost contact with the nipple.
Other stratagems include remote feeders generated by fixing the position of the container with respect to the infant's crib or bed at about the same elevation as the infants's head or higher and connecting the container to a remote nipple by a flexible tube. The nipple, having only its own slight weight plus the slight weight of the adjacent connecting tube and its contents, could be retained by the infant in her mouth with ease, despite her own motion. The container has its position fixed by means of hooks or clamps or suction cups allowing it to be securely positioned with respect to a support structure such as a crib side or an auto window.
The presence of a long flexible tube has generated parents fears that the infant could become entangled with the tube causing it distress or harm. My invention is directed toward a non-tangling, non-strangling improvement in remote feeders.